Mobile computers and Personal Digital Assistants, or PDAs, are becoming more common in meeting rooms and other group work situations. Various network protocols that allow such systems to share and exchange information are emerging, such as in a Small Area Network (SAN) using the Bluetooth™ protocol, sponsored by International Business Machines Corporation™. Simultaneously, advances in speech recognition technology are allowing high-quality speech transcription. In a SAN, there could be one or more devices with the capability of capturing speech as audio data. Also, one or more devices could have speech recognition technology. However, these devices are not able to share or exchange the audio data or the results of the speech recognition, and thus, the overall speech recognition task in a group environment is not efficient.
Accordingly, what is needed is a system and method for collaborative speech recognition in a network. The present invention addresses such a need.